Pike County Commissioners got an update on various issues with the Pike County Judicial Complex at Monday’s commission meeting.

Ken Upchurch, managing principal of TCU Consulting Services, told the commission the Alabama Division of Construction Management conducted a one-year warranty inspection on July 7, 2024. Upchurch said the results of the inspection had been compiled by the state and reviewed by TCU Consulting.

“I wanted to highlight a couple of things from the certificate of substantial completion,” Upchurch said. “It had 110 pages of noted items that required corrected work. That’s really not that unusual in a building of this size and complexity. [The noted items] were reviewed by the architect over a period of time and were deemed completed.

​​”There were 135 entries in that one year’s period and the average was eight days before the time of notification to completion. So that’s again, that’s really pretty good … There were 22 pages of warranty-type items. All those items were worked, reviewed and deemed completed by the architect and the state. And I want to make this note right here. The general contractor, even though his one-year warranty period is up, has continued to respond to any calls that come in, and that’s really important.”

Upchurch said the biggest issue was flood damage to the building caused by failed gaskets during a winter storm in January.

Upchurch said there were 193 heat pumps in the building and each heat pump has two gaskets. Upchurch said that was a total of 386 gaskets and only five failed. The flood caused some county offices to temporarily relocate to the Pike County Courthouse while the Judicial Complex was being repaired. At the time, there were also some health concerns related to chemicals being used in the heating and cooling system. All county offices assigned to the building have moved back into the Judicial Complex.

“The insurance company did the cleanup and the retrofitting of [the building],” Upchurch said. “We continued to study and I think the county did an environmental test and then the insurance company did another one. Both were deemed completely acceptable and available for people to go back in the building. So no one was put in harm.”

Upchurch said in an investigation of the incident, temperature graphs for the cooling system were examined and  for about a two week period, the temperature in the cooling system dropped very low. He said there was a brief period where the system warmed up and then the system’s temperature dropped into the low 30s during the winter storm.

“Everything was tracked down very well, which means that it was within tolerances and there shouldn’t have been any alarms going off,” Upchurch said. “Trane, who monitors all of this, claims that they were providing alarms. Clearly, when you have that long period of time, about 10 days to two-week period of time in there, and nobody from Pike County responded, then Trane should have raised the flag a lot bigger. So we put a lot of this on Trane and their operations. We don’t put it on the county people because y’all got full-time jobs. You’re paying them to notify you when there’s a problem.”

Upchurch said TCU Consulting was continuing to work with Trane to address the issue.

Upchurch said other issues of note that were corrected were a generator at E-911 that did not automatically start during a power failure, a fire pump control panel in the jail was not functioning when the building was on emergency power, delivery trucks were scraping into the bottom of the canopy after being unloaded at the jail, a fire sprinkler leak in a courtroom, temperature control units in the jail were shutting off because of high voltage alarms and washing machines in the jail were improperly installed.